5d ago

Sorry, Cthulhu -- you'll always be my number 2

Bob the Angry Flower - The First Commandment

You're viewing a single thread.

80 comments

It's important to remember at all times that every single thing religious, was made up by very stupid people. Either stupid for living 1,000-5,000 years ago, and having zero education, or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit.
Confusion happens when things don't make sense. Religions don't make sense because they're hasty lies. You know people that constantly lie. They may even be religious. You're going to trust knowledge of an afterlife to a hallucination they had? lol. No.
That's why religions brainwash small children using fear.
- stupid for living 1,000-5,000 years ago, and having zero education, or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit
  This is why I'm always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.
  Just kicking in the door and shouting "Everyone who conceived of a being more powerful than themselves and attempted to extrapolate the natural world into an explainable series of events was FUCKING DUMB AS SHIT" is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.
  Nevermind the chauvinism and the egotism of this bland dogmatic assertion. You're casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development, because people 5000 years ago weren't spoon-fed a level of education (mixed with its own heady brand of western War on Terror propaganda) you received a few years ago.
  That’s why religions brainwash small children using fear.
  Trying to explain to my five year old why transendentalism is going to ruin their life and perpetuate generations of human suffering without scaring them. Maybe if I lead in with "Catholics are going to rape you! Stay away from the church!" they'll get the core logic and reason without experiencing any kind of reflexive emotional response.
  
  This is why I’m always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.
  Its not a philosophy, its a position on the existence of god.
  is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.
  Its simple because its only a statement of belief in no god in the form of identification. A historical perspective is not needed to come to a conclusion as to whether people who believe in god are stupid or smart. You can also do that through thinking about their rationality or logical process for coming to those conclusions.
  You’re casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development
  If I wrote a philosophy or theology about how everything is made of bananas, and then for hundreds/thousands of years people argued about the nuances of my absurd and baseless belief system I think it'd be fair to dismiss it anyway. It doesn't matter how much fan fiction is written about Musaceae-ology. You don't have to read it, you can safely ignore it.
  
  Trying to explain to my five year old why transendentalism is going to ruin their life and perpetuate generations of human suffering without scaring them. Maybe if I lead in with “Catholics are going to rape you! Stay away from the church!” they’ll get the core logic and reason without experiencing any kind of reflexive emotional response.
  Are you fucking for real? Yeah, let's compare some theoretical woo to centuries of very real sexual abuse by the Catholic (and lets be real, every fucking other) church.
  How is "transendentalism" going to ruin your child's life and perpetuate generations of human suffering? What the fuck are you even talking about? Like the type of meditation that hippies thought was magic?
- or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit.
  Look around. Religions exist. Cults exist. Plenty of people have found great success by starting a religion/cult, whether that means access to power, money, wives, children, etc. If they got what they wanted out of the deal, then I'd be more keen to hone in on greed or selfishness as their most prominent character flaw rather than question their intelligence.
- Religion is baked into our very genes.
  “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
  ― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
  And yes, the penultimate sentence is an experimentally verified fact.
  
  Peter Watts, Echopraxia
  
  Another man of class I see. Would you care for a glass of sherry in my reading room? Or perhaps a cold Keystone in my living room? Either way, you are most welcome.

80 comments